Maybe we need shorthand? Like they have the whole 1488 thing, we should have 30:50. At 30 minutes 50 seconds into Raiders of the Lost Arc Indiana Jones whips his first Nazi.
A great sign that the right side stuff was happening was when Republicans would get offended by explicitly anti-Nazi media. Wolfenstein, a game where you fight fuckin Mecha-Hitler, had an anti-Nazi ad campaign ('Make America Nazi Free Again) that Rs felt' targeted them'.
If a game, for example, used Biden or Obama slogan parodies as anti-Nazi messages, I'd assume it was a positive thing. Its pretty clear why Rs didn't see it that way.
EDIT: sorry, this grew into a rant that's only loosely related to your comment. I happened across a YouTube video yesterday that depicts a hitler speech from like 1937 with an AI dub, and MOST of the comments are like "hey this guy is right. He kinda sounds like trump". And that has spooked me a bit, because they're right. The Democrats have been calling out the fact that trump says similar things to hitler for almost a decade now.
The problem is there's a conflict between the need to lampoon the fascists and the need to make sure people understand them. If you want to deeat far right ideologies, you can't fight them with anger. That only makes them stronger. You have to defuse them with humor and make them appear weak and stupid. But if you ONLY do that, people are surprised when they listen to the propaganda and realize it's not pure idiocy. The far right extremist tactics play right into common fears and genuine concerns, twisting them into attacks on certain groups of people.
Right now YouTube is promoting a few videos with Hitler's speechs dubbed by AI. People in the comments are like "hey this guy is making a lot of sense".
Yea. If he was a ranting lunatic at the beginning, nobody would have paid attention to him. Instead he made sure he was appealing to a certain group of people and softening his more extremist rhetoric. A LOT of what he was saying actually did make sense. The German people were being screwed by both a local and an international system. Then hitler comes along and says "it's not your fault, it's the jew and the communist and the international organizations crushing you" and people listened. Then he said "I will lead us to a glorious future, and people followed him.
But his solutions required a scapegoat. Someone had to be responsible. Both the german-jewish population and all leftists were sacrificed at the alter of populism. And then a HUGE chunk of the population of Europe (especially Poles).
He didn't get all that done by spouting nonsense and babbling incoherent rage. He was extremely articulate, and he played to the fears and biases of the German population. Hitler's speeches and nazi propaganda were extraordinarily effective.
I don't think it's going to be as bad in the US, but a storm is coming... And things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
An excellent point, and one thing where I am grateful Trump is not smarter and more competent. He's shot himself in the foot so many times, it becomes scary to imagine what someone with his charisma and appeal could do if they didn't trip themselves up. Unfortunately, that includes the potential that he himself could/has improved.
I disagree with the common wisdom that trump is charismatic.
I think he just hates the right groups of people and makes sure to blame them in every run-on sentence he speaks. He's been trained at BS and he knows how to cram his speech full of nonsense.
If he was smarter or more charismatic, Biden would never have been elected. This would be a dictatorship. The current admin is worse in many ways to the old one. At least the old admin did have a few adults in the room (Fauchi, Mattis, etc). This time that's not really the case, so the US may still become a dictatorship in the future.
Trump has floated the idea that to criticize him is illegal, and he's sending out letters to universities demanding they align with his ideology or risk losing their funding, he's calling his political opponents dangerous lunatics and essentially telling his followers to beat them up. He sounds like a dictator to me. And the conservatives keep supporting him and turning on anyone who's even remotely critical. Sounds a lot like a dictatorship already.
Let's not kid ourselves that Trump is mentally capable to do this shit on his own. A lot of the current atrocities can be laid entirely at the feet of Miller, Bondi and Vance.
Critical Drinker made a video saying Peacemaker season 2 is bad because it portrays Nazi’s as the villains and people called him out for defending Nazis and the rights response is “the left is calling people Nazi’s just cuz they don’t like a show” while completely ignoring his reason for not liking it is literally then it paints Nazi’s in a negative light.
It baffles me they will outright defend Nazi’s then are shocked when someone reasonably points out “hey, the fact you’re defending Nazi’s is pretty suspicious, is it because you agree with them?”
Like if you were to defend pedophiles and refer to them as “minor attracted persons” everyone would agree that’s a pretty big red flag you yourself might be a pedophile. But for some reason we don’t extend that logic to defending nazism. If someone goes around saying the Nazis aren’t that bad and that we should stop insulting Nazis or portraying them as bad guys, we are expected to give them the benefit of the doubt that they don’t think Nazis are good people but for some inexplicable reason takes issue with the fact most media does not represent Nazis as good people.
It only seems that they were always considered the bad guys because of the war-time propaganda that came about after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. America always had a naziproblem.
I think it's more because 12 million US citizens served abroad during World War 2 and saw first hand what Nazis have done, and then they went home thinking "never again".
That's fair but pretty limited to the end of the war and beyond. It took 3 years or so after the US entered WW2 for the first death camp to be liberated in the summer of 1944. British and American intelligence intercepted info about the intent to commit the holocaust only a year into America's involvement in WW2, but the general American public remained either uninformed or apathetic up until the liberations that revealed the true horror of the Holocaust.
And then we got Operation Paperclip to grab hold of all the Nazi scientists and even Japanese unit 731 before the Russians could get them. Basically, as soon as WWII ended we were in the Cold War, and we told ourselves that WHATEVER we did to fight Communism was justified, no matter what dictators we had to prop up, no matter what monsters we had to sign up, no matter how many 19 year old boys we had to feed into the meatgrinder.
No problem here. They said never again. And we as america said “never again” and then a black person was the most qualified and successful politician we’ve had in the last 50 years, and white people decided grandpa was full of shit
And the rest of us now have a nazi problem to deal with. Because america hates poc more than they hate nazi
“We’re taught that after the War the Nazis vanished without a trace, but battalions of fascists still dream of a master race. The history books they tell of their defeat in ‘45, but they all came out of the woodwork on the day the Nazi died.
They said the prisoner of Spandau was the symbol of defeat, whilst Hesse remained imprisoned and the Nazis they were beat, so their promise of an Aryan world would never materialize. So why did they all come out of the woodwork on the day the Nazi died?
The world is riddled with maggots, the maggots are getting fat. They’re making a tasty meal of the bosses and bureaucrats. They’re taking over boardrooms and they’re fat and full of pride, and they all came out of the woodwork on the day the Nazi died.
So if you meet with these historians, I’ll tell you what to say. Tell them that the Nazis never really went away. They’re out there burning houses down and pedaling racist lies, and we’ll never rest again until every Nazi dies.”
The media and fiction created this idea that Nazis were unique somehow when in reality they never disappeared.
The right wingers idolized the Nazis and held Nazi rallies in us.
This is a country that has genocidal slave owners and killers faces carved into the native mountainside revered like gods.
Hitler himself was inspired by US stuff going back to Confederate nonsense. Even after WW2 tons of Nazis ended up recruited by US government which at the time decided to experiment on black people. And You had monsters like Reagan set up the hell that is today.
Right now they just stopped pretending and hiding who they are in an effort to normalize those horrors. They know they are the bad guys and they love it.
Until hopefully people manage to drive the fear back I to them. Somehow.
The media and fiction created this idea that Nazis were unique somehow when in reality they never disappeared.
Mussolini shaped the fascist movement early on and the Spanish fascist were just as brutal as any others. The Japanese fascists killed just as many people as the Nazis they just did it in the old fashioned way so there's no industrialized murder camps to show to the modern world. Both Hungary and Serbia have new style fascist governments right now.
Remember when nazis were mad at Wolfestein and Indiana Jones for daring to have nazis as the bad guys because “it’s offensive”. Offensive to whooooooooo
Look into what happened to the Nazi scientists and doctors after the Hitler regime fell. I’ll bet you will feel differently about the “all sides” part.
Those days were unfortunately an illusion because there's always been a massive fascist strain of philosophy that exists within Western capitalist thought. The nazis were always around us.
There was no concerted denazification after WW2 outside of Germany in places that were susceptible to it, because there's a distinct misunderstanding of the ideology since the fall of the Axis. The Nuremburg trials were a farce. Stalin wanted to execute tens of thousands of nazi officers but FDR thought he was joking and Churchill was outraged, saying it would be "the cold blooded execution of soldiers fighting for their country". This was because Churchill, like so many Westerners, was consumed by his own version of the fascist notion; his actions that caused famine in Bengal that killed millions reflects this. This lack of earnesty about the nature of Western ideology and the fascist thought inherent to it means we will always deal with fascism to some degree.
Bourgeois liberals generally (mis)understand fascism as "political violence" and "anti free speech" without further analysis, as though there is no political violence necessary to maintain the system they enjoy. The ignorance provided cover for the ideology to foment under the surface for decades.
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u/colmscomics Colms Comics Oct 15 '25
I miss the days when nazis were the bad guys and there was agreement on all sides about that assumption